“Une jeune fille fort sérieuse”: Suzanne Lambin (1902-2008), A Pioneer in Biomedicine and Biomathematics

Abstract

In 1951 Suzanne Lambin (1902-2008) became the first woman to occupy a chair (microbiology) at the Faculty of Pharmacy of Paris University. Her scientific career offers an example of the rise to visibility of a young woman scientist from an educated, middle class family thanks to the opening up of public education towards women in France during the Third Republic. She had the opportunity to collaborate with four outstanding figures in the golden age of theoretical ecology and to participate in this intellectual enterprise: as a student at Nantes, she worked with Stéphane Leduc (1853-1939), and in the ‘Thirties, in Paris, together with her mentor, Jean Régnier (1892-1946), she collaborated with two mathematicians, the Italian Vito Volterra (1860-1940) and the Russian Vladimir Kostizin (1883-1963). Thus, Lambin’s scientific career was also helped by the encounters with men who were open-minded both regarding the collaboration with women in research, and regarding the exploration of new paths in science. This essay is based on unpublished sources from Lambin’s personal archive, and on an interview with her in her Paris home. Régnier’s and Lambin’s technical ability and theoretical, dynamical approach to the evolution of microbiological populations made it possible to set up a series of experiments in the Régnier microbiological laboratory at the Ambroise Paré Hospital to provide biological feedback for Volterra’s equations of population dynamics. Their research was a seminal contribution to the evolution of biomathematics, and the underlying scientific project can be better grasped thanks to the unpublished introduction to a projected book on the numerical approach in microbiology, or - in the authors’ words - the “cyphered knowledge of the rhythms of life”.